Category: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

REINALDO ESCOBAR UNEDITED IN VOICES 2 / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo / Reinaldo Escobar

The image of the forest, the identity of the tree

Reinaldo Escobar

LITTLE has been revealed of the controversial life of Juan Bautista Spotorno, a commander of the Spanish militia and led an insurrection and became acting president of the Republic in Arms. He issued a famous decree that bears his name, that provided that any person bearing a proposal for peace without independence would be shot. Three years later he joined the committee that negotiated the peace with the Spanish and that led to the Pact of Zanjón. He ended up being an autonomist.

I can imagine that in the ranks of the Liberation Army there must have been numerous people like Spotorno, about whom it is difficult to be sure they were wrong when they thought they were right, or that they were right at times when they thought they were wrong. Men full of contradictions, passions, virtues, personal defects and that ingredient that makes a human being normal and mortal. However, the veil of glory that covers all the mambises with the same dignity, because the heroes, the martyrs, are the what keeps the story alive in the memory of a people. They stained with their blood the timeless colors of the flags, and with their war cries and screams of pain they filled the high notes of the national anthem.

Every era has its paladins. The struggle against Machado had Julio Antonio Mello, later expelled for indiscipline from the party he himself had founded, but finally sheltered in his last words, “I die for the Revolution.” The fights against Batista had José Antonio Echevarría, a fervent Catholic who had never accepted the imposition of communist atheism but who could not be exiled from the revolutionary pantheon because he died riddled with bullets with a pistol in his hand.

I once heard a decorated veteran of the Bay of Pigs say he had witnessed that not all the dead had fallen in combat at the front and I heard the same from a veteran from Angola, where almost more were killed by accidents, murders and executions, than in combat actions. But the glory, even if not eternal, is generous and it is enough to have died in the right place at the right time to be blessed by it. The living are the ones who then have problems.

Most of the senior offices of the Liberation Army who survived the war ended up, with few exceptions, disillusioned or corrupted by the Republic. This scenario is repeated over and over. I often wonder what we wold be saying now about Camilo Cienfuegos if he had kept repeating, for fifty years, his, “You’re doing well, Fidel.” The tourists would not be buying shirts with photos of Che Guevara if he were still heading up some ministry which I suspect still wouldn’t work. The epithet that encompasses a host of heroes almost always makes each one a great figure, but the fault is not theirs but that of the propagandists of one kind or another, who strive to come up with angelic characterizations, almost always far from human miseries, the appetites, vices and bad habits that make us unworthy of and aura.

Right now, overdue government sanity is about to dismantle the episode of the 75 imprisoned during the Black Spring of 2003. Before too long they will cease to be “the defenders of civil rights, victims of the cruel repression of the dictatorship,” to be, to become again, themselves.

The time is coming when we will discover among them one who doesn’t know which letter gets the accent in the word política, or others who never want to hear the name of Cuba again, and no doubt there will be one who wants to divorce his Lady in White, the same one who Sunday after Sunday, over seven long years, was at Santa Rita church praying and shouting for his freedom. Some will say some stupid thing in their first interview, or sign the first thing put in front of them to get ahead.

There will be something of everything, because everything is there. But I want one thing known: for me, who is not perfect either, you will continue to the “The 75,” that group that never went anywhere together and among whom there are probably not three of you who can agree on two points. Whatever happens with the trees, the forest will be in my heart.

September 28, 2010

DIRUBE’S DRAWINGS…? / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

A VISIT TO VISTA MAR

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

In a cultural magazine of the Catholic Church, I read the tiniest notice, published maybe a couple of months ago. It spoke of a chapel abandoned for many years and of a mural by Dirube that survived in its interior decor.

This past weekend I went up the Santa María del Mar hill, crossed a small, grassy park full of prisoners or crazies with gray uniforms (they performed labor-therapy), and I found the chapel at the end, with its cross raised towards the sky between a telecommunications tower and hard-currency hostel.

The place was beaten by neglect. Palsied fences, planks, bricks. A family inhabited a part of the building, as worse they could. And, in fact, I saw master strokes on the wall, adjacent to what may have been an altar.

It was a virgin. A Picasso virgin, chopped. Ruled, with baby God and little boat of charity with its three rafters included. Thin and thick lines, straight and curved, interwoven, illegible, perhaps a dystrophic flower, a goatish eye, everything holding glimmers of light that may well have been just remains of another painting that eventually faded.

There was an atrocious silence. A resonant vacuum perfect for Dirube, who was deaf from infancy, as well as unknown on the island during his biography. I put my ear to the mural. On the other side one could hear the voice-over bustle of a black Cuban family at the margins of a worldwide 21st century. It smelled of cockroaches and fresh cement.

I felt an inconsolable sadness. Fifty years ago, that division was being built to populate the future. People came and climbed these same hills and put their money to work as a function for creating an architecture of rupture against the patriotic Provincialism of our city concept.

Then they had to immediately flee from the overwhelming justice of the Revolution and they lost forever the epiphanic vision of a cyan sea. The vision that I now had for free, ignorant witness but susceptible to pain.

I took pictures. I breathed. I looked at the concave and claustrophobic line of Playas del Este. It was Saturday afternoon. It seemed to be the last weekend of the nation.

I do not know if, as he died in the nineties, Dirube remembered this mural. I don’t even know if he finished it or if I marveled at a mere sketch at the hands of a magician. Nonetheless, it was a miracle that his work still remained standing, fading without an audience in the face of ministerial indolence, waiting for me to pass serendipitously though here and kneel before the gods gone to pray.

I wanted to be humbled, sink before the splendor in ruins of a dead countryman, ask for forgiveness for so many kicks and coffins in exchange for nothing. I wanted to rebuild the imminent Cuba parting from a Dirube that may well have been a fake or by another painter (I do not trust the cultural magazines of any church).

Cuban culture is somewhat like that smudge, that scribbling of papers and walls, that despotic disregard against those who do not commune with the official faith, that masterpiece for nobody, that apocryphal elite that the people employ as latrine or guest house.

I left. I don’t know if I’ll return to the little chapel. Maybe I should organize a camping trip or hold a mass there in the name of all of you. That super modern temple, that the sloth of the religious institution did not know how to conserve, would be an excellent niche to begin repainting with the colors of change in Cuba.

Translated by: Joanne Gómez

September 21, 2010

ONE SQUARE METER OF FREEDOM / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Antony of el Grupo Amistad, the Friendship Group, (the same group that ran the March for Non-Violence on Friday, November 6, 2010), at the start of the presentations during the performance ONE SQUARE METER OF FREEDOM in the Park at 21st and H, El Vedado, Havana, Cuba, today, Saturday, September 25, 2010, at 4:00 PM.

September 25, 2010

YOANI SANCHEZ IN VOICES 2 / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo / Yoani Sánchez

THE SACK OF THE DISSIDENTS

Yoani Sánchez

A sugar-coated image shows Cuba as a country where social justice triumphed, despite having North American imperialism as an enemy. For more than half a century, the country has fed the illusion of a people united in support of an ideal, working hard to develop a Utopia under the wise direction of its leaders. The political and tourist propaganda, distorting our reality, have put out the word that those who oppose the revolutionary cause are mercenaries without ideology, in the service of foreign masters.

One has to wonder how it happened, a process that led millions on this planet to believe that unanimity was installed, naturally and voluntarily, on an island of 111,000 square kilometers. What made them believe the story of a nation ideologically monochromatic and of a Party that represented and was supported by every single one of its inhabitants.

In 1959, when the insurrection against the dictator Fulgencio Batista triumphed, the bearded ones came to power, throwing their enemies into a sack labeled, “thugs and torturers of the tyranny.”

Throughout the decade of the sixties, and as a consequence of the revolutionary laws that ultimately confiscated all productive and lucrative property, that initial definition had to be expanded, adding the labels “the landowners and exploiters of the humble,” and “those who are trying to return to the shameless capitalist past,” and other similar class epitaphs.

Coming into the decade of the eighties, others who fell into the bin of those opposing the system, including “those who are not willing to sacrifice for a bright future,” and “the scum,” this linguistic discovery that tried to define a subproduct of the crucible that forged not only the socialist society but also the new man, who would have the duty to build, and one day to enjoy, the Utopia.

The labelers of opinion recognize no difference between those who opposed the early promises of social transformation, and those believers who ended up frustrated before its failure to come to pass. Because every promise has a deadline, especially if it is a political promise, and when the extensions proclaimed in the speeches expire, patience runs out and difficult-to-label positions appear in those eternally classified as citizens. So over several decades there have appeared in Cuba those who argue that things must be done another way, those who come to the conclusion that an entire nation was dragged into the realization of a mission impossible, many of whom would like to introduce some reforms, including those who would lie to change everything.

But there’s the sack with its insatiable open mouth, and the same hand throwing into it everyone who dares to confront the one possible “truth” monopolized by the powers-that-be. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Social Democrat or a Liberal, a Christian Democrat or an Environmentalist, a simply an independent non-conformist; if they don’t agree with the dictates of the only permitted party — the Communist Party — they are taken as opponents, mercenaries, traitors, in short, they are classified as agents in the pay of the imperialists.

Obstinately, many continue to look at the rosy little picture that shows a social justice process that tries to justify the intolerance that goes along with its achievements — already badly deteriorated — in health and education. They are those who cannot understand that the models used to delineate the triumphalist portrait of the Cuban system turn out very differently when they come down from the pedestal where they pose. Hospital patient and school student are not synonymous with the citizens of a republic. When a man and a woman, of flesh and blood, with their own aspirations and dreams, find themselves outside “the zone of benefits of the Revolution,” they discover they have no private space to build a family, nor wages commensurate with their work, nor any way to achieve a legal and decent prosperity.

When they also reflect on the paths within their power to change their situation, they fine only two: emigration or crime. If they come to meditate on how to change the situation of the country, they are overcome by panic at the threatening finger of the omnipresent State, the insults, the revolutionary intolerance that allows no criticism, no suggestions. Then they realize they’ve been thrown into the sack with the dissidents, where all that awaits them are stigmatization, exile, or the prison cell.

September 25, 2010

VOICES 2 IS NOW READY… / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

FLYING THE WORLD ON A WHITE HORSE

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

SHITTY SONGS that mark the death of our poor and provincial heart. Trivial ballads of course. Mournful poems that our progenitors interpreted while performing their domestic chores on the weekend or while making mediocre love at night (that other domestic chore).

Bad music. The worst. Inimitable and without equal. Tropical bedroom kitsch. Light boleros and popcorn melodramas of cuckolds and hard women. Stanzas crushed with unforgettable verses, harmonies that will accompany us beyond the Final Judgment before a State Prosecutor or God.

With that soundtrack we sucked on titties and learned the first native words of Spanish, español, ezpañol. Genetic melodies, ringtones, pleasant despite their ingenuity. All of the background of swept neighborhoods under the howls of the baby we were and the oneiric onanisms of the adolescent we aged into without ever being one.

Today Cuba has forcefully muted the cries of condemnation and political demagoguery, theatrical pasture for the masses: the racket of the non-aesthetic end of a Revolution whose little soundtrack no one will ever hum again.

Today we are like zombies in the key of G sharp major, the most boring of the chords. Monotony of a musical staff left with empty microphones. Just as no one remembers the apocalyptic threats of the Premier of our only Party, so no one remembers the lyrics of the latest hit of last season’s ballads.

We delete scenes. Vacate barely at the rhythm of the undertow. Cuba as a perfect paronym of Coda.

And then, when hope finally leaves like an endemic disease, when we know that we are alone in our generation, and that we will not do anything that will be worth the trouble of thinking, then, tired of beating our heads against the suicidal ghosts and the pragmatic functionaries which unknowingly we have become, when the brilliance of the day-to-day becomes a mist passing through our conceptual cataracts of people who stole the time they were called on to live, then, the softness of that music of our Mongolian childhoods is still waiting there, like a visa to save us, like a talisman against dictatorships, totalitarian or democratized, like a pillow on which to to lay one’s neck, to ask love’s forgiveness for how much we chattered in its name and for how little we practiced it.

The entire culture will only make sense, then, in two or three trashy phrases that will express better than any treatise what we were but we ignored. Wretched hendecasyllables of those who had no intention to escape, because among their noxious metaphors, in some of their thousand-and-one honeyed voices (better than the false intelligence of the poets of truth), the secret soul of the final phase of this so-called Cubanness, will resonate.

September 23, 2010

A New Feature: Photos From Boring Home Utopics / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Note from the site manager:

The link at the top of the sidebar that says “Cuba in Photos” takes you to the blog “Boring Home Utopics” where Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo — to my mind probably the best photographer working in Cuba today — posts his daily creations.  Another element of the BHU blog is a standing offer to Cubans in exile to take photos of the places that figure strongly in their memories of home, and post them, which has led to some very moving entries. Starting today, in a completely random fashion based on my own taste, suggestions from Orlando, and available time to post them, I intend to start posting periodic samples of BHU’s daily photos.  To see the rest, all you have to do is click on the link.



Photos: Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Posted: September 9, 2010

ALL ABOUT E / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

E

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Her name is E. She’s twenty years old. She’s alive. She’s crazy. She’s desperate to do things, including, of course, the limitless freedom of her body. She’s sad. She’s very alone. She’s content in Cuba, at the reach of my hands and my writing. At the margin of everything, myself included. It’s impossible to not fall madly in love with such a little creature. E, exclusive vowel.

So thin. So angular. So dyed of an ancestral black. So scanty. A memorandum of death. So much desire compressed in a pair of decades. So orphaned. Such a vision when her smile at last bursts an explosion of pleasure. She smokes. Drinks. So post-Cuban, trapped in the shitty Little Havana of the thousand and one independent artistic groups that only dare to size up their own fear. Where would these lost angels hide if an explosion of hatred or perhaps a military re-concentration broke out right now in Cuba? They would commit suicide, certainly. Private beauty does not tolerate the mediocrity of the communal.

Hopefully E never gets killed. She’s at risk. She’s exposed. Museum of meows. She doesn’t stop. She gets involved. She’s expelled. They pedal over the minimal discharge of her backbone (her back is a cat’s back). She gets lost. Lunatic of the slums. She loses us. Not the faun’s labyrinth, but the nymph’s. She types formulas of circuits and impossible projects of books made with little pictures. She doesn’t sleep, accordingly. She doesn’t eat, except from other mouths. E is exceptionally spectacular.

I hope E reappears. That she resists. That she doesn’t become diluted in the familiar defect that this criminally conservative society has always been. I hope that she’s not deceived in her ingenuity of never telling lies. I hope that E lies. May she lie to us. May she manipulate us. May she mutate, but may she please survive the critical Cuba of the University during the times of Resurrection.

I hope to write more about E. All about E. Don’t envy me. Wait until I understand or extend myself better with E.

Translated by: Joanne Gomez

September 3, 2010